Thrills and chills at the Games
These sports aren’t for the faint hearted and require so much skill and commitment that I admire every one of the 21 Kiwi athletes
We are one week into the Winter Olympic Games and we have yet to see any real results from our Kiwi athletes on the ice and snow.
A couple have flirted with the idea. Carlos Garcia Knight had us gripped with his fifth place in the men’s snowboard slopestyle and Palmerston North’s mulleted hero Peter Michael was placed fourth in the 5000 metre speed skating finals
Military man Rhys Thornbury was looking promising on Friday when he was placed seventh in the men’s skeleton heats only to fumble in his final and be sent all the way back to 14th. The British Royal Air Force technician was reduced to tears at the end of his run and that spoke volumes about what it meant to him.
What these close encounters demonstrate is that medals at the Winter Olympics do not come easy and while we can all harp on that it has been 26 years since New Zealand collected it’s first and only medal when alpine skier Annelise Coberger then unexpectedly claimed silver in the slalom at Albertville in France in 1992, the truth is Kiwis don’t really pay pittance to snow sports until a medal is on the line.
Naturally, we are quite good at climbing on a bandwagon and getting in behind athletes at the eleventh hour, while for four years prior we ignore these talented athletes with hearts of gold and nerves of steel.
These sports aren’t for the faint hearted and require so much skill and commitment that I admire every one of the 21 Kiwi athletes representing us against the best in the world. Namely
from Europe and North America where snow sports to them is what rugby is to us. For most of the Kiwi contingent this has been their dream since they picked up the skis, skates or snowboard at ages two, three and four years-old. The odd one, such as Thornbury who took up
skeleton racing just four years ago, started later.
What they all do have in common is they have funded their sport out of their own pocket while at school and for the lucky ones a sponsor has come in to play. They are not waved at with large contracts like in other sports.
These athletes aren’t just spoilt rich kids on skis, and they certainly aren’t ‘‘weed heads’’. They do what most of us wouldn’t dare even if given a free entry and a hefty pay packet.
Speaking with Kiwi freestyle skier Britt Hawes this week ahead of her halfpipe on Monday, she said she had been blown away at the support from her friends and family and often strangers back home. She said she didn’t know where it had come from and no one even knew her name or who she was before being selected in the Kiwi Winter Olympic squad.
Garcia Knight said the support he had from home only this week gave him the confidence to throw down the best run of his life.
So, it is a great thing that we are jumping on the Winter Olympics bandwagon once again, but let’s try hold this momentum and then maybe, just maybe snow sports in New Zealand can be recognised as a world challenger and get more funding in the years to come.
The medals should then come a little easier and we would have grounds to be disappointed if they don’t.
I have been captivated by these games. While it is the biggest competitive stage for some of these sports, there are no egos out there and most of them are just doing it because they love it.
We have so many exciting stories at these games such as the first all African women’s bobsled team, the South Korean and North Korean combined women’s Ice Hockey team and a home town hero Yun Sungbin winning the men’s gold medal in the skeleton race.
The South Korean time zone would have it that we can sit back and watch these ‘‘rad’’ sports, unfamiliar to many of us. So with one week to go let’s keep the bandwagon rolling and see what can happen.